The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About Social Media

We all know the adage about advice, but what about advice on social media?

If you have tried social media marketing, we bet you like to take valuable advice from the experts on what to do and not to do. Although most advices you hear from those “so-called” social media gurus are based on sound logic, you cannot always follow them because they are simply NOT PRODUCTIVE!

In this post, we will cover some common marketing practices, though they may harmless at first, that have the potential of destroying your social media campaign in the long run.

If you do not want anything to destroy your social media strategy, make sure you read all the way until the end of this article. I will promise you that it will be an ‘eye opener’ for you.

Worst Advice Ever #1: You need to be on popular social media sites: –

Social Media Popularity

Do you know how many social network sites are there in the Internet?

Countless!

If you hope to be active on each one of them, or even 5 to 10 of them, you are going to spend hours and hours of time just managing your profiles – time you could have spent doing constructive things such as expanding your business interests.

Select 3-4 popular social media platforms that your audience are most active on, and then use them consistently.

If your online business deal with fashion, travel, or landscaping, Pinterest would be more useful for you rather than using LinkedIn. However, the latter is more resourceful when you are selling products and services for business professionals.

Worst Advice Ever #2: You need to keep posting updates (tirelessly):-

Social Media Updates

Social media experts may have you believe that endless posting of updates is a good marketing strategy, but in case you did not detect the sarcasm there, let use make it extremely clear for you – posting 100s of updates every week is not as same as engagement. Flood social networks with useless chitchat and the only result you will get is your followers “un-following” you.

Instead of exploding sites with 100s of useless updates, customize your posts for your audience because they are the heart of your business and offering relevant and useful content is the very least you can do for them.

Worst Advice Ever #3: You need to use hashtags to gain viewership: –

Using Hashtags

Initially, Hashtags were used on Twitter to increase social engagement, but now, you can do the same on Instagram and Facebook. As unusual this may seem to marketers who had been there before the dawn of Facebook and Twitter, potential clients and the younger generation find Hashtags very interesting – they use it as naturally and commonly as they would type a search query in Google.

Hashtags offers tremendous benefits to individuals.

People can see a sharp increase in engagement through Hashtags because it allows them to follow trends and learn what others are talking about. Furthermore, it allows companies to monitor and measure the success of their campaigns.

As helpful as they might be, if you over use them, however, they can put people off your posts. Use hashtags couple of times (not 10 times) per post and only when they are needed!

We have also heard many people say that they no longer do Twitter chats as they may lose their followers because of the overly active hour during the Twitter chat. But we believe that the value you get from a Twitter chat far outweighs all the negatives, such as losing a follower. If you are offering value to your followers, answering their questions, and basically helping them, nobody will “unfollow” you during Twitter chats. No one will say, “I will unfollow this guy because he constantly tweets me useful information!”

Worst Advice Ever #5: Social Media Tools Are Way Too Expensive: –

Social Media Tools

People say that social media tools are expensive, but with the level of value they bring to you and your business, you really have not much to complain about the price tag associated with it. Tools can not only help save time, but also help you get better returns for your business, so before considering the tool will be expensive for you, you need to figure out how much time and value you will receive. For instance, $80 a month for a tool can become cheap based on what value it brings you to your company.

Social media is a VERY powerful tool that is available to everyone, which is the part of the problem itself. Many people are experts now, and they think they know what is best for them.

We are not trying to influence you to listen to us instead of other social media experts. But, trust us when we say that we are doing a lot better than all the people who are telling you to use the advices mentioned in this post. In addition to these worst advices, there are so many other advices out there, and it your responsibility to follow the ones that works for you.

The overall goal of this post was to show you not to be afraid to explore and use the best social media sites for finding and connecting with your audiences. Just remember to make your posts tailored and relevant to your audience and keep things simple and easy by not overusing any one tip over the other. Mix it up, and try exploring new ideas and experiment!

We love to hear from you: What was the worst advice you have ever heard about social media? The weirdest, the better! Please share them with us in the comment section below.